A New Look at Rabelais and His World

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559).

In a poem addressed to his readers, the sixteenth-century French humanist François Rabelais introduces the first book of his encyclopedic pentalogy, Gargantua and Pantagruel, with an ode to humor. The invocation, originally written in Renaissance French, ends by celebrating laughter as one of humanity’s defining traits: “Mieux est de ris que de larmes escrier. / Par ce que rire est le propre de l’homme.”1 Rabelais’s first English translator, Thomas Urquhart (who, fittingly, died from a fit of “excessive laughter” after learning of Charles II’s restoration to the English throne), renders the couplet as “One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span; Because to laugh, is proper to the man.”2

The poem stands in stark contrast to the dour treatment that laughter has received from Western philosophers, starting in classical antiquity and continuing through the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Plato saw it as a dereliction of reason and took Homer to task for suggesting that there was laughter among the gods on Mount Olympus. Early Christian theologians placed a similar emphasis on discretion, decorum, and restraint. The fourth-century Church Father John Chrysostom believed it to be a slippery slope of escalating violence, and Basil the Great saw laughter as evidence of a poorly regulated soul. René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, close contemporaries to Urquhart, also held laughter in low esteem, writing of it as cold, cruel, and cowardly.

Rabelais’s celebration of humor, however, is neither a historical aberration nor an intellectual curiosity. Rather, he joins and upholds a durable tradition that celebrates earthy folk humor as an affirmative relief from drudgery, oppression, and officialdom. Aristotle described those “who never by any chance say anything funny” as morose boors; and Pliny the Elder claimed that Zoroaster laughed on the day he was born, as evidence of natural, in-born wisdom. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that “those who are without playfulness are sinful,” and celebrated mirth as “useful for the sake of rest and pleasures it affords.”3

For Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais so successfully channels the history of unofficial humor that his pentalogy demands an adjustment to standards of taste and a restructuring of the concepts we use to understand a work of art. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin’s now classic 1965 survey of folk laughter, the grotesque body, and carnival festivity, he argues that Gargantua and Pantagruel violated the serious tone of canonical literary form by integrating “public-square festivities of the carnival type, individual laughter rites and cults, jesters and fools” into a unified, holistic text. In Sergeiy Sandler’s introduction to his newly revised, newly translated edition of Bakhtin’s monograph, he observes that the novelty of Bakhtin’s book lay in his understanding of laughter as both a “stand-in for death” and “an antidote to fear.”4

The laughter Bakhtin traces from antiquity to Rabelais was an ambivalent laughter. Gargantua and Pantagruel, which follows the deeds and exploits of two grotesque, hedonistic, and highly educated giants, mingles scatological humor, profanation, and folk festivity with Rabelais’s polymathic, polyglot erudition, which he picked up while taking holy orders at a Franciscan monastery, and later, while working as a doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon.

As a work of satire following the Menippean tradition of Lucian, Gargantua and Pantagruel skewers broad intellectual structures rather than the behavior of aberrant individuals. Unlike the satirists of antiquity, whose parodic thrust was often geared toward negating or correcting social ills, laughter in Rabelais, writes Bakhtin, has a “positive, affirming character.”5 The life of leisure and excess that the books’ eponymous giants lead in the Abbey of Théleme should not be read as a critique of gluttony and idleness. Rather, it is an aspirational, Epicurean life free from fear and rich in fellowship and wisdom. They reside in “a utopian realm,” as Bakhtin has it, “of all-inclusiveness, freedom, equality, and plenty.”6 Although there is an undoubtedly harsh bite to the books’ burlesque send-up of social shortcomings, where Rabelais tears down institutions he does so to suggest the erection of a better world atop the ruins of the past.

On its face, Rabelais and His World is ostensibly of a piece with mid-twentieth century historicist literary criticism. The compelling case that Bakhtin makes for laughter’s place in the lives of ordinary Renaissance peasants, laborers, and merchants makes his book as much a valuable contribution to the history of ideas as a work of literary criticism. In many ways, Bakhtin does for European folk history what Lucien Febvre does for religion in his own book on Rabelais, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Where Febvre charts the emergent strains of early evangelical Christianity, humanism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism to illustrate the ideological impossibility of irreligion for an educated European in the years following the Protestant Reformation, Bakhtin maps the topography of feasts, festivals, the public square, and grotesque images of the body to argue that in the world of Rabelais’s turbulent sixteenth century, laughter held “a deep philosophical meaning; it is one of the most essential forms of truth about the world as a whole, about history, about the human being.”7

This was laughter of wholly different order from the mocking, spiteful laughter dismissed by stoic philosophers and early Christians alike. It was also not a laughter unique to Rabelais. Bakhtin’s encyclopedic index of ribald humor among the peasantry, read alongside Febvre’s catalog of the period’s clerical jokes, should temper some of the apparent scandal that we might want to project onto the sensual representation of the body, the earthy folk wisdom, and the word-drunk linguistic revelry on display in Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Bakhtin identifies three distinguishing traits that set the “ritual” laughter of the Renaissance apart from the “corrective” laughter of satirical mockery: it was communal rather than individual; it was universally directed at “everything and everyone,” including its participants; and it was an ambivalent combination of jubilee and ridicule that celebrated the cycle of death and rebirth. The radical originality of Rabelais and His World lies in the central place that Bakhtin gives to this ambivalence. This is also where Bakhtin parts ways with Febvre, who suggests that it was Rabelais’s singular talent that distinguished him from other writers of sixteenth-century satire.

Though Febvre’s examples may match Rabelais in irreverence, they lack his ambivalence. Instead, geared toward laying bare hypocrisy or exposing corruption, they take on a negative tone and normative function. Michel Menot’s sermons, for example, mock pretentious outward displays of piety by paving the streets of hell with tonsures. Gilles Pépin portrayed purveyors of relics as deceptive confidence men.8

For Bakhtin, negativity is only half the story in Rabelais. Though there is undoubtedly a strong element of derision that drives Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais’s use of satirical uncrowning, lowering, and blasphemy, writes Bakhtin, “has not only an annihilating, negating sense, but also a positive reviving one.”9 In contrast to conventional satire, which aims to negate, excise, or correct social ills through ridicule, Bakhtin presents ritual laughter in Gargantua and Pantagruel as a productive, progressive path toward healing and renewal.

Bakhtin enlists his exploration of laughter and festival culture in the service of his abiding interest in the carnivalesque. Beginning in the 1920s, Bakhtin became fascinated by the ecstatic atmosphere and Dionysiac revelry of folk holidays (such as Roman Bacchanalia), which he viewed as liberated from social barriers and class hierarchy. In an inversion of the mundane, carnival, for Bakhtin, is “life drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent ‘life turned inside out.’”10

In Gargantua and Pantagruel, this often appears in the form of comically grotesque (often disgusting, frankly) depictions of the body. These are often tempting to read solely for their gross-out shock value in terms similar to Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles, Gilbert Gottfried’s “Aristocrats” joke, or the Instagram user @da_jekyll’s farting skulls, skeletons, and reapers.11 However, even so bluntly repulsive an episode as the “long and painstaking experiments” Gargantua conducts to find “a way to wipe [his] ass,” which catalogs the pros and cons of different alternatives to toilet paper, uses its repellent frame toward a generative end. In less capable hands, the escapade might simply nauseate. However, by turning everyday objects toward an “unexpected purpose,” Bakhtin believes that Rabelais turns this unconventional assessment process toward witty puns, novel connections, and genuinely poetic new ways to examine quotidian objects.

Gargantua’s ass-wiping escapade works as a model-in-miniature for the future-oriented cycle of death and rebirth Bakhtin sees as the driving force behind Gargantua and Pantagruel. Despite its apparent frivolity, by degrading both common, utilitarian objects and luxurious rarities to forge new, otherwise unexpected poetic connections and juxtapositions, Rabelais forces the reader toward a renewed lease on the objects that Gargantua inspects. As Bakhtin has it, this is an illustrative example of how Rabelais uses the grotesque in the employ of renewal, rejuvenation, and becoming, whereas a more a straightforwardly satirical use of something like scat might only be used for mockery (such as Dante’s burying of the flatterers of Hell’s eight circle in poop forever).

Equally important to Rabelais’s comically grotesque depiction of the body as a site of renewal, writes Bakhtin, is his presentation of the “body in the act of becoming.” Thresholds and doors, portals and boundaries are important figures in Bakhtin’s open-ended conception of both consciousness and time. In Rabelais and His World, orifices and protrusions take on a similarly important role. They mark the “boundary lines between the body and the world,” representing the blurry, permeable border that separates our souls within from the world without. Images of the swallowing mouth or shitting anus, for Bakhtin, reveal the body as an “ever-unfinished, ever-created, and -creating body” that links our development to the cosmos. Much as our bodies naturally project outward, into the world, our perception is shaped by the world’s penetration of our bodies through our senses. The body, writes Bakhtin, “devours the world and is itself being devoured by the world.”12

In Bakhtin’s earlier monograph, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, he argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky was the first writer to consciously take advantage of the peculiar discursive flexibility afforded by the novel as a distinct literary form. Dostoevsky set himself apart by orchestrating distinct characterological voices that express fully realized worldviews, which interact without authorial intervention. In their “plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its out world,” Dostoevsky’s books construct a “polyphonic” world populated by heroes who are “not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse.”13 For Bakhtin, this enabled subjective positions, philosophical worldviews, and forms of discourse to supplement one another through an ongoing dialogue rather than through demanding that one position (usually that of the author, voiced through a character acting as a mouthpiece) emerge victorious.

Problems also includes an early foray into the questions that would later come to predominate Bakhtin’s thought in Rabelais and His World. It contains the introduction of a rudimentary theory of carnival that explains the role of the literary appropriation of the carnivalesque in the history of the novel—a theory that guides his later interpretation of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Carnival, he writes, is a “pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators”; it is the space where life is “turned inside out” and where hierarchical structures are replaced by “free and familiar contact among people.” By opening a second life marked by the suspension of difference between people, the atmosphere of carnival draws self-enclosed, atomized individuals together in a “joyful relativity” that links “heterogenous and incompatible elements” into an organic whole.14

Following the high premium that Bakhtin’s early writing placed on the uniqueness of the individual, a pivot toward celebrating a borderless collectivity might seem like a contradictory break from his previous texts. Though it is a mistake to read it as such, many otherwise astute thinkers have fallen into the trap of divorcing Bakhtin’s later theorization of carnival from the rest of his thought.

Boris Groys sees carnival as a pathos welcoming the “‘final death’ of everything individual and the victory of the purely material, bodily principle over everything transcendental, ideal, individually immortal.”15  Likewise, in In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), Slavoj Žižek devotes considerable space to dismissing the progressive potential that Bakhtin saw in the carnivalesque.  Žižek writes: “While everybody loves democratic revolutions, the spectacular/carnivalesque explosions of popular will” meet resistance “when this will wants to persist, to institutionalize itself.” At its most dangerous, Žižek likens carnival to the irrational burst of violence that took place during the Stalinist purges, arguing that the “liberating experience” promised by the radical suspension of order gives way to “a flash of thwarted and repressed aggression.” At its most benign, according to Žižek, “the Bakhtinian fantasmatic space in which ‘normal’ power relations are inverted” captures revolutionary momentum and drains it of its political potential.16 In this way, the carnivalesque amounts to little more than a containment strategy or “safety valve” that allows the dissatisfied masses to burn off excessive subversive energy to ensure stability in the social order, “letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society intact,” as Herbert Marcuse argued in his essay on repressive tolerance.17

In some ways, Bakhtin—or at least the difficult publishing atmosphere in which he worked—is to blame for obscuring the throughline that connects his monographs. A reading of Rabelais that is not informed by Problems is likely to yield a similar conclusion to Žižek or Groys. However, among Sandler’s achievements in his revised edition is the supporting context he provides to curb some of the most common misreadings the book has provoked.

By pursuing fragmentary notes that Bakhtin compiled on Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Sandler points to the omnipresence of Cassirer’s thought in Bakhtin’s work—which censorship led Bakhtin to downplay and suppress. Bakhtin draws from Cassirer’s notion of the “cosmic image,” which binds the intelligible together with the sensible, rooting the soul in a “definite, organic body.” This preserves the first-person perspective, but at the same time opens consciousness to multiplicity and “the manifoldness of culture.”18 In many ways, the Renaissance cosmic image that preceded the clear and distinct boundaries René Descartes set for the subject resembles the post-structuralist critique that followed almost four hundred years later. As Febvre writes of Rabelais and his contemporaries, “They perceived one reality, single and multiple, physical and spiritual, that always continued to exist and to circulate.”19 Sandler argues that Bakhtin, by drawing from the carnival tradition, could project an image of a global process of historical change without compromising the local perspective of the individual. It was not an erasure, as Groys suggests, but an expansion of the individual that opened consciousness to its mutual implication with other, equally real, equally open individuals.

For Bakhtin, our subjectivity is so thoroughly shot through with anticipated responses and unvoiced rejoinders to an imagined host of others that there is no monologue—consciousness itself is sustained by dialogue. In this, Bakhtin bears a close resemblance to later thinkers of the twentieth century such as Gilles Deleuze, who described a similar mutual implication of subject positions as elastic bodies that cannot merge but that fold into one another in a “continuous labyrinth,” or Michel Serres, who saw subjectivity dispersed across a network of “polytopic” nodes mediated by a “transcendental space of communication.”20 For Bakhtin, our consciousness cannot sustain itself without some form of communication with another; even when we are alone, we maintain a minimal form of dialogue between conflicting parts of ourselves. 

Bakhtinian dialogue is best understood as a roving, open-ended conversation, without any party having the final word. To think about others without closing them off as finalized images, he writes, means “to talk with them.”21 Dialogue, for Bakhtin, is an unceasing process or event. Though there is no perfect solution to the representation of dialogue as an unfinalizeable event, for Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s polyphonic method brought his novels to a position of maximally close contact with the unfolding of reality through their performance of “a world of consciousnesses mutually illuminating one another,” as an open event rather than a mere depiction of a closed object.22

In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin explores the collective dimension of such “mutually illuminating” consciousnesses. Where he celebrated Dostoevsky for his success in staging the psychological experience of internally dialogized consciousness, he praises Rabelais for capturing this experience from the exterior perspective. In the cries of Rabelais’s bustling crowds, Bakhtin heard the “utopian tones” of a communal festivity “deeply immersed in the thick of life—concrete, tangible, meaningful in a practical way, full of smells, loud in a public-square manner.” The collective vision that the festive utopias in Rabelais put forth was, much like dialogue in Dostoevsky, something that cannot be directly represented but must instead be “played out without any footlights, played out within life itself … While the usual world order is canceled, the new utopian order that has come to replace it is sovereign and applies to everyone.”23 Through his vivid evocations of a carnivalesque atmosphere, Bakhtin believed that Rabelais made legible the latent, though omnipresent, potential for collective action and communal life.